Refraction Page 3

“No, you do!” Crush growled, charging Max. Max sidestepped and jabbed him in the ribs. Crush barely flinched.

  Max bounced on his feet as Crush turned back toward him. At least now Max was between Crush and the door. All he had to do was keep him occupied long enough for his mom to come.

  Crush swung at him, and they exchanged a flurry of blows, Max desperately deflecting Crush’s fists. Catching even one hit from Crush at the wrong angle could put Max out of action for good. Max slipped in as many jabs as he could—even if they weren’t going to put Crush down, they at least distracted him from getting back to the device.

  “Ha!” Max crowed after a particularly good throat shot. “Some Crush you are. After I defeat you, maybe I’ll steal your name. I’ll be the Crush, and you’ll disappear into faded memories.”

  “Yeah,” Crush coughed, “that might be a good move for you, Dino-man. You defeat any cavemen lately?”

  “It’s Dynaman. Because I’m dynamic,” Max hissed, good humor evaporating. “And anyway that’s not even geo-chronologically accurate.”

  Crush grinned like a lunkhead and threw another easily dodged haymaker at Max. “How did Catalyst let you get away with that dumb name? Normally she’s got better taste than that.”

  Max glowered. “Mom says choosing a name is an intrinsic and inalienable aspect of developing your sense of personal identity.”

  “Wow,” Crush said. “So you never got asked to prom, I guess.”

  “Shut up!” Max yelled and shot Crush in the face with his Taser.

  CRUSH WOKE with a start, then groaned loudly and yanked at his wrist cuffs.

  “This again?” he demanded.

  “Shut up,” Max snapped. “Captives don’t get to talk. Unless you want me to get creative with this again.” He waggled the Taser in his fingers.

  Crush glowered but kept his mouth shut. Max smirked at him.

  Their beautiful, golden silence lasted about three minutes.

  “So where are we this time?” Crush grumbled with the air of someone who recovered from pain much faster than the average human and therefore had fewer self-preservation skills.

  “A roof,” Max told him, viciously enjoying Crush’s frustrated, powerless scowl.

  They were only one building over from the security firm so Max could dash back to the fight if his mom called, but Crush couldn’t see up over the walls, and Max wasn’t about to inform him. He might try harder to break free if he knew.

  “This is such a waste of time!” Crush complained, yanking at his cuffs again.

  “Knock it off,” Max snapped.

  Crush was right, though—this sucked. Having to drag both Crush and himself away from the fight made him feel infuriatingly powerless, but it would take a braver man than Max to disobey his mother.

  “Seriously, stop it,” Max said again, because of course Crush hadn’t listened to him. “Those cuffs are reinforced six ways from Sunday. You really think my mom would send me up here with anything less than the best?”

  “Oh, like none of her other plans ever fail!” Crush scoffed. His wrists were turning red and swollen around the cuffs. “We’ve beaten you twelve times this year.”

  “Shut up!” Max yelled while Crush continued to pull, his arms bulging with the force of it. “God, don’t you ever give up?”

  “I’ll never give in to the likes of you!” Crush spat.

  Max pulled up short. It shocked him, somehow, to see Crush look at him with that much vitriol. He’d fought against Crush for over a year now, and the expression was as familiar to him as breathing. But this wasn’t the same kid who trailed him through the hallways at school and complimented his color-coding scheme in his calc notes.

  Max watched Crush glare at him, red-faced and furious. “You really have no idea, do you?”

  Crush huffed. “What?”

  It had to be true. Crush’s face held nothing but undisguised hatred for Dynaman, and Crush just wasn’t capable of the type of long-game double-bluff Max had been on the lookout for.

  The Crush genuinely wanted to bash his face in, and Crush genuinely wanted to be his friend, and Max was the only one who knew what was happening.

  He walked to the other end of the roof, leaving Crush behind to rage impotently at the sky. Max had too many things to think about right now.

  “OH MY God,” Max groaned as Crush dropped into the desk behind him. “Did you switch your schedule to do this? There is no way you were in this many of my classes before.”

  Crush frowned at him. “Of course I was.”

  Max groaned again and buried his face in his textbook. He’d really been hoping Crush would give it a rest today and give him some time to process. This was a situation that required consideration! Of course, Crush didn’t know there was a situation.

  There were a lot of things Max should probably do here, and none of them were “form an emotionally significant relationship with your archnemesis.” He should probably inform his mom—his boss—for one. He should probably gain Crush’s trust and try to pry trade secrets out of him. He should probably try to gain access to the Goodmans’ headquarters. He should probably learn personal secrets about Crush and use them for blackmail. He should probably kidnap Crush and hold him for ransom.

  Crush leaned forward while their teacher called the class to order, his presence warm next to Max’s shoulder. His breath feathered along Max’s neck when he whispered, “Just because I sat in the back doesn’t mean I wasn’t here.”

  Max swallowed. “I think that’s a double negative,” he rasped.

  Because, the thing about it, the thing was, Max had always known who Crush was—everyone did. But Crush had seemed happy to let their social circles never cross at school. Crush was around, and Max was around, but they weren’t around together. And Max had been okay with that. His mother had warned him early on to keep his distance for fear of being found out, and while some of the other League teens liked to brush the hero crowds to dance with fire, Max agreed with his mom—both because college admissions frowned on public records of supervillainy, and out of a personal distaste for the frankly uninspired personality required to be a superhero. They were just so… bland. And complacent.

  So Crush going around being all interesting at Max—that threw a wrench in his world view, and he couldn’t quite convince himself to let it go yet. He resigned himself to being Crush’s partner when Crush volunteered them for English jeopardy, and he boggled at how excited Crush was when they won. He gathered up his books quickly afterward, before Crush could do something crazy like offer to carry them, but he didn’t object when Crush followed him out of the classroom anyway.

  Didn’t object much.

  “Aren’t you going to be late if you follow me all the way to the lab?” he huffed. “Don’t tell me you have AP Physics too.”

  Crush looked wounded.

  Max sighed. “Of course you do.”

  “Physics is a valuable theoretical and practical field,” Crush recited in the tone of someone who didn’t necessarily see the point himself but figured it must be true. He probably got this stuff straight from the hero handbook.

  Max scoffed, annoyed at the thought. “Yeah, or maybe it’s just fun. Do you know how much awesome stuff you can make once you understand how electrical circuits work?”

  Crush’s step faltered, and Max abruptly panicked—was that too obvious? Was that something a supervillain would say?—but then Crush smiled, somehow wide and uncertain at the same time.

  “Maybe you can show me sometime,” he suggested.

  “Uh.” Max coughed. His fingers clenched around the strap of his bag.

  “I mean, it can’t be any worse than the assignments Brady comes up with.”

  “Oh my God,” Max exclaimed. “Thank you.” Their student teacher for physics was the absolute worst. “His experiments would bore a fifth grader to tears!”

  Crush laughed, and he looked like he felt guilty about it, but he still said, “I think we really did do the bouncing ball
experiment in fifth grade, though.”

  “With Mrs. Draper!” Max agreed, oddly transfixed by the way insulting a teacher drew a light blush across Crush’s cheekbones.

  “So,” Crush said quietly, pushing the door open over Max’s shoulder, “can I sit at your lab table?”

  Max swallowed and worked his jaw a few times. “Yes,” he decided, then quietly panicked as his archnemesis cheerfully inserted himself right into Max’s routine.

  MAX WENT home that night very determined not to think about Crush at all, but the guy was worse than pink elephants. Once Max had stopped yelling at him and started talking to him, Crush’s goody two-shoes script had slowly slipped away and revealed a fascinating capacity for critical commentary.

  “I don’t like the school’s grilled cheese,” he’d admitted as he polished off his third sandwich in the cafeteria.

  “Mr. Boswell doesn’t consider extracurriculars when he assigns homework,” he had said, “even though he always lectures us on applying to the best colleges. Everyone knows you have to have extracurriculars for that!”

  “I don’t think our school has the best antibullying policy,” he’d confessed as they walked past the principal’s office.

  Ok, so he still sounded like a goody two-shoes, but he wasn’t thinking like one. Against his better judgment, Max was intrigued.

  Max was really intrigued. It was almost definitely going to become a huge problem, because Max was walking a tightrope right now, and he knew it. He had to make sure Crush didn’t figure out who he was, because everything he probably should have done to Crush, Crush definitely should do to him if he realized Max was Dynaman. Or at least the morally defensible superhero version of it. Max couldn’t afford to give Crush all the power over him Crush had inadvertently handed to Max.

  “What’s your real name?” Max had asked after physics.

  “Oh, it’s Crush.”

  “Wait… that’s not a nickname?”

  Crush had smiled, amused. “No….”

  “So you literally were born for greatness,” Max had said, realization dawning. “That’s disgusting.”

  “It’s not so bad.” Crush had grinned and shrugged, and Max had been struck by the knowledge that if Max had called Crush disgusting five hours later, the Crush would have tried to separate Dynaman’s head from his body.

  It was all very jarring and complicated and was bound to blow up in his face at some point. Max had watched enough movies to know that.

  These thoughts chased him all the way home, where he found his mother pacing in the kitchen, wearing a welding apron over her pajamas. Her left eyelid twitched occasionally.

  “How long have you been awake?” Max sighed, dropping his backpack into a chair.

  “Hmmm?”

  It’d definitely been a few days. She functioned well for about thirty-six hours, but after that she had trouble holding the thread of conversations. Too many ideas getting in the way.

  “You should at least wear work boots when you’re fabricating, you know.” He eyed her fuzzy slippers as he headed to the fridge for a snack.

  “They’ve moved the device,” she muttered to herself, smearing away one of the equations on the chalkboard. “Have to account for the viscosity of the mortar when….”

  Max rolled his eyes. “Seriously?” He pulled a package of string cheese and an errant screwdriver from the fridge, dropping them both on the kitchen table as he sprawled into an empty chair. “This is getting ridiculous. We’ve tried twice already—we’re not making any progress. Why don’t we just call the League?”

  This got his mother’s attention. She zeroed in on him, losing the frenetic edge as she found her focus.

  “Our colleagues are helpful at times, Max,” she said, wrinkling her nose, “but there are those on the League who don’t represent our ideals. As critical as the device is to our work, it is less dangerous in the hands of power hungry superheroes than power hungry supervillains.”

  Max raised a skeptical eyebrow.

  “Yes, Max. Superheroes at least have to maintain the illusion of altruism, which binds their hands and gives us more time to work.”

  Max groaned. “There has to be a better way, though.”

  Life was too complicated already trying to navigate school with Crush attached to his hip. He’d been hoping to lie low on the professional end of things. Keep his head down for a while. Every time he had to fight Crush outside of school was an opportunity to slip up and expose himself—either to Crush or to his mom, who he definitely did not want to know about his secret, illicit friendship.

  “The way to success is perseverance and elbow grease,” his mother instructed, dooming Max to be a junior hero wrangler and, inevitably, a disaster.

  “DYNAMAN, CAPTURE the Crush and detain him!”

  “Really?” Max cringed. “Why can’t I—”

  “Do you ever want to see your car keys again, young man?”

  “Ugh. Fine.”

  “DYNAMAN, THE Crush!”

  “On it,” Max grumbled.

  “DYNAMAN! CAPTURE—”

  “—the Crush and detain him. I got it.”

  CRUSH TAPPED his fingers on the arm of his chair, scowling. It was currently the only part of his body he could move—Max had been a little irritated and maybe had gone overboard on the duct tape alloy his mom invented. “So why does your family keep kidnapping me?” Crush asked.

  To be honest, Max was surprised it had taken him this long.

  Max had decided on the power plant control room this time. Gas the guard, set phasers to autopilot, and no one’s the wiser as long as the plant’s alarms didn’t go off. It was a cushy gig.

  Max spun his (ergonomic, top of the line) computer chair absently. It was a sweet room but seriously lacking in entertainment, unless you had a particular interest in CCTV. Plus, there were no pockets on his costume, so he didn’t even have his phone to play with, and his mom had chewed him out the last time he’d abandoned Crush on the roof.

  “Standard procedure,” he answered. He’d gotten dangerously comfortable with this little double life he had to lead. His fear that Crush would figure it out had slowly faded—Crush just wasn’t used to looking for duplicity the way Max was.

  “Wait, what?”

  “Yeah, there’s a rehabilitation track for all underage superheroes. Capture and reeducate.” Max planted his feet on the floor, the room continuing to spin around him for a moment as he righted himself. “You didn’t know?”

  “You want to—you think you’re going to sway a superhero to a life of crime?”

  Max shrugged, his lips quirked. “It’s happened before.”

  “No, it—” Crush sputtered. “No, it has not.”

  Crush was so funny when he was indignant. He was always so steady at school. Max wanted to rile him up. He kicked his feet up on the computer console, feeling enormously self-satisfied. “Doctor Decay.”

  Crush’s face bunched up like he’d eaten a slimy sock. “But that guy is… horrible.”

  “Overcompensating,” Max confided. Decay was pretty gross. His battles had brutal civilian casualty counts and hardly any pizzazz at all. Most of the Injustice League avoided working with him more than absolutely necessary. His mother had a particular distaste for him, especially lately.

  “So why aren’t you trying to reeducate me?” Crush asked. He seemed to have forgotten about attempting to break through his restraints. “All we ever do is sit here.”

  “Not much to work with, I guess.” Max smirked just to see what Crush would do.

  “I’m not dumb,” Crush growled. A sore point, apparently. Another thing Crush didn’t seem to be touchy about at school. He asked Max a lot of questions about homework, but he seemed to approach it as collaborative and never acted begrudging about it.

  “I don’t think you’re dumb. I just don’t think you have what it takes to be a supervillain,” Max said. “You’re not cut out for it.”

  “Good!” Crush attempted to cross his
arms but just ended up rattling his chair a bit. “Thank you.”

  It helped Max to think of Crush as two separate people. The Crush was mouthy, arrogant, and self-righteous. Normal Crush was sweet, kind of bashful, and interested in Max. It was almost too easy to separate both of them into their different identities: The Crush and Dynaman, Crush and Max.

  But every once in a while Crush would do something so un-Crush-like that Max got pissed at him for being so contradictory.

  “You have no idea,” Max snapped. Villains might like their monologues, but superheroes were the most sanctimonious jerks. This was what he hated about Crush Goodman: Superhero. “Being a supervillain means defying established power structures and demanding better than you’ve been given. Superheroes are mindless thugs. You and your dad, you’re nothing but guns, pointed at whatever someone else wants destroyed.”

  Crush jerked against his chair again. “I’m not a gun! We’re shields, protecting the people from sociopaths like you!”

  “Yeah, ‘the people,’” Max scoffed, fed up. He should have known this would end in disappointment. “You’re such a sheep. I thought you were better than th—ugh, thank God,” he said as his communicator beeped. His mom had finished with Mr. Magnificent and was recalling him to the helibot, and he didn’t have to stick around amusing this lemming anymore.

  Crush shouted, “What do you mean—” But Max slammed the door behind him loud enough to echo. He had better things to do.

  THE WORST thing about being mad at his “friend who was his enemy who didn’t know he was his enemy” was that Max couldn’t actually take Crush down for any of the things he didn’t know he’d done, because it would blow Max’s secret identity. And also it probably wasn’t fair.

  But mostly the identity part.

  The only thing that made him even angrier than being angry in the first place was not being able to do anything about being angry.

  Max stormed into school with his rage wrapped around him like a straitjacket and vowed to himself not to get into any kind of altercation with Crush that might lead to Max outing himself. Better to play nice than to have a handful of felonies slapped on you.